Writing in a dark room

In the first writing class I took, my teacher generally praised my writing, but remarked with increasing concern that my stories seemed to take place in a “white room.” He said that my work was suffering from some White Room Syndrome adjacent problem. In particular, he thought it was strange that my stories would include all the other senses, except visual. I would tell readers about smells, sounds, textures, but I wasn’t describing what things looked like. Over the course of that first class, I learned to insert visual details. Colors, shapes, shading. “Don’t just tell what the couch felt like. Tell what it looked like,” he said to me.

For a very long time, I assumed this was part of the learning curve. I knew that writers described what things looked like in books, but when I was writing, it wasn’t a natural part of my process. I had to learn to do it. Frequently, when I’m writing a first draft, that’s the last thing I do. I go back and I put in visual descriptors. I have to do it mechanically, because otherwise I forget. So it goes on a to-do list along with things like Delete 90% of the times you wrote just or even.

It’s strange the things you get used to, because I haven’t thought about it much in the intervening years. Then, last month, I saw a graphic that pinged something deep inside my brain. Sadly, I can’t find the actual graphic that made me think about it, so you’ll have to make do with this one.

You’ll understand how little thought I’ve given this in my life, when I say that my reaction was: “Wait! Some people see actual pictures?” I know that everyone has a different brain that works its own way, but it really had never occurred to me that some people might be imagining full color renders of objects in their minds, because mine is completely without a visual component. Now that I understand what a wide range of situations exist in terms of imagination, I’ve been asking everybody I know about what they see when they imagine things. I’ve racked up a dozen people who feel they’re in the 3 zone, but also a solid half dozen who say they are 1s, including a friend who sees entirely realistic movies in their head. (I’m a little jealous of that, and also a bit tormented by the fact that even the word imagination seems to suggest that the source of creativity is a visual process.)

All of those people who have mental imagery have asked me the same question: How do you write books without being able to visualize things? Turns out, my brain is a lot different than I thought it was, because I’m working entirely without any pictures in my head. It’s totally black in there*. So when I’m imagining a scene–say Kellen crashing his motorcycle and being found by Wavy–I’m experiencing that scene. I’m mentally creating what the air feels like. Temperature, humidity, smells. I’m experiencing sounds, including dialogue. I’m crafting a sense of the characters. How much space they take up, how they move, how it feels to be inside their skin. Later, I have to put in visual elements, because those don’t come along with all the other stuff. I have to manufacture visuals very purposefully out of things I’ve seen. I can imagine things I haven’t seen, but I’m still starting primarily from a spatial understanding of things, rather than a visual one.

If I’m writing a scene that needs to be carefully staged, where I have to know exactly where everything and everyone is, I map it out on paper. That’s not even the weird part. The weird part is that what’s inside my head isn’t always what I map out, because so much of what I create is based on a sense of spatial awareness that doesn’t always translate into visuals. So I’ll create a map to write the scene, but it’s not what I imagine in my head, even after the scene is written. This isn’t a big deal, except sometimes it takes many drafts for me to be able to write a correctly mapped scene, because the overlay in my head doesn’t line up.

In short, I’m not writing in a white room, I’m writing in a dark room. I don’t see the things I write. I only sense them. The same is true of my memories. They don’t come with pictures, just a sense of the place where they happened. I guess that means I’m living in a dark room, too.

*I have one visual element that occurs when I’ve had my eyes closed for a long time. In that ten or fifteen minutes before I fall asleep, I see what I have always called The Quasar. It’s a black circular object against a black field. It’s only visible because it has a ring of light around it, brighter on one side than the other, that rotates. While I’m “looking” at it, I can control the speed of the rotation, but when I’m passively experiencing it, the rotation is slow and steady. It feels a little like a lighthouse beacon, the beam slowly rotating to warn ships away from the rocks. I’ve always assumed it’s some kind of weird optical nerve thing.

Schrödinger’s Billionaire and OCD

I wasn’t diagnosed with OCD until I was an adult, but once the diagnosis was made, a lot of things in my life came into sharper focus. The problem was that I didn’t have any of the “fun, quirky” OCD symptoms. I have a lot rituals, which mostly just look weird to outsiders. I suffer from excoriation (a compulsion to pick at my skin), which is not pretty. The main symptom of my OCD is completely invisible, though: intrusive thoughts. I have an assortment of intrusive thoughts, but one that you’ll inevitably hear about if you spend much time with me is my Top 10 Worst Deaths list.

I’ve been maintaining this list of terrible deaths for the better part of 40 years. Essentially, since I read an encyclopedia entry about Floyd Collins, and was introduced to the concept of dying in a small place. The advent of the internet has really improved the quality of my list, because it delivers up to me true and truly terrible ways to die. Now, keep in mind, there’s nothing objective about this list. Rather than being the most horrific deaths imaginable, it’s a carefully curated list that reflects only my intrusive thoughts about dying in enclosed spaces. Am I claustrophobic? Yes, a bit, but not in a way that makes it impossible for me to ride an elevator, for example. Rather, I think about dying while trapped in a small, confined space, roughly 100 times a day.

My worst death list doesn’t contain any of the traditional torture methods. Nor does it represent the most gruesome deaths. My list is mostly all about caves, building collapses, people trapped in chimneys. Oh and submarines. At the very top of the list is the story of Peter Verhulsel of South Africa, who became lost while diving in a cave. As he ran out of oxygen, he managed to find a small cavern with a beach and an air pocket. There, he waited for rescue. Without oxygen in his tanks, no idea where he was, and no way to communicate with the outside world, all he could do was wait in the cold and the dark. Assuming he had drowned, his friends searched for his body for over a month. When at last he was found, the coroner concluded that after approximately three weeks in that little cavern, he starved to death.

photo by Erin Khoo

No surprise, this is the source of my “interest” in the submersible, Titan, which went missing during a dive on the wreck of Titanic. I use the word interest fairly loosely, because it’s not as though my brain gives me the option of not thinking about the submersible and the fate of its crew. Like Schrödinger’s cat, they are alive and dead until we know for sure, but my brain is already obsessing over the worst possible outcomes. I don’t want to think about it, or about the people inside, just as I didn’t want to think about the crew of K-141 Kursk, or the children in Thailand who spent almost three weeks trapped in the flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave system, before thankfully being rescued. I just don’t have a choice. It’s called an intrusive thought for a reason.

I don’t know what the odds are that the submersible will ever be found, but I am compelled to wait for the news. After all, from the perspective of the list, explosive decompression wouldn’t even be in the top 1000. That sounds quick enough to be almost painless and devoid of time to think. Staring down your final hours trapped in a little carbon fiber tube with four other people? That would make the top 10. Let’s hope for a happy ending and an unchanged list.

Rehab Exercises and Vibes

Bruno, the handsomest dog I ever met

Back in 2020, this magnificent knucklehead was so happy to see me that he ran full speed down the length of the house and body slammed me. All eighty pounds of him–BLAM!–directly into the front of my right knee.

In fact he hit me so hard that my knee locked up in the straightened position for several hours before I could get it to bend. After that, my knee has never been right again. Sadly, Bruno has left us, but I’ll never forget him courtesy of my knee.

In the last three years, I’ve been to various doctors. I’ve done three separate rounds of physical therapy. I’ve done acupuncture and massage therapy. My right knee is still messed up, and as a result, now my left knee is wrecked from picking up the slack.

Maybe the worst part about all this is how completely tedious I find rehab exercises. The only exercising I’ve ever enjoyed in life is walking. I used to walk about ten miles a day. Once my knee was injured, though, I descended into a hell of rehab exercises. Do this exercise. 3 sets of 10 reps on each leg. Repeat for the next exercise and the next and the next. Counting to 10 over and over and over honestly damages my will to live. The last three years have been a joyless montage of 3 sets of 10 reps. Some days it’s nearly impossibly to motivate myself to go do the work. That’s why I feel like I’ve discovered some incredible secret to exercising.

I STOPPED COUNTING. That’s it. Last week, I stopped counting. I don’t count my reps. I don’t count my sets. I don’t use a timer. It’s just vibes. I do an exercise until it feels like I’ve done enough. Then I do it on the other leg. Then I go onto the next exercise and do it until it feels like enough. The way this has completely changed my relationship to rehab exercises is amazing. I just get up in the morning and do them. I don’t make excuses. I don’t have to berate or threaten myself. I don’t dread that hour of my day. (And yes, the vibe method takes the same amount of time as the tedious counting method.)

I don’t know if anybody else is trapped in a counting hell of patellar lifts and hip CARS, but I highly recommend giving up on the counting. And if you’re a physical therapist, have you considered not assigning exercises in a way that’s guaranteed to make them as loathsome as possible?

The Thunderbirds of Stull

When I was in college, there was a series of urban myths built around the town of Stull, Kansas. The story usually involved a friend of a friend who had come to grief in Stull. A disappearance, a murder, a Satanic ritual in the Stull Cemetery, or sometimes just a deeply unnerving feeling experienced while changing your tire by the side of a lonely, rural highway. Sometimes we traded them like campfire ghost stories, especially the more ridiculous ones. The deeply troubling ones, the ones that seemed plausible, however, crept under our skin and stayed there.

These days, I drive through Stull every week or so, going between home and various appointments. I don’t like to drive Stull Road at night, as silly as that is, but see above, for the stories that crept under my skin.

One of the first things I noticed when I started regularly passing through Stull was the absence of any but the freshest of road kill. I might see a freshly splatted possum or a deer carcass from the night before, but when I drove past a week later, the possum would be gone and the deer carcass picked down to white bones. If you’ve done a lot of rural driving, you know that’s not standard. Dead raccoons swell and split on the shoulder, waiting on the arrival of a highway cleanup crew. It can take months for a dead deer to sink into the ditch with its desiccated hide draped over bones like a mortuary tent. In the environs of Stull, however, roadkill mostly disappears before it rots.

I’m not prone to superstition, but it did raise my hackles a bit, until the day I spotted a golden eagle excavating the corpse of deer that had barely begun to attract flies. She ripped her way into its belly, tore out some bloody piece of flesh it’s better not to think about, and flew away. After that, I began to watch more closely, slowing down and searching the skies and tree tops above Stull. Soon enough I discovered a second golden eagle, this one a little larger and with a bit more white among its feathers. He was drifting on a thermal, scouring the roadside for an easy meal.

I’m not a photographer, so I don’t waste my time trying to capture them that way. Instead, when time allows, I like to drive up and down the gravel roads around Stull, hoping for a glimpse of them. My greatest sighting so far has been the pair, rarely seen together, perched side by side on a telephone pole. Driving by, I knew they were watching me back. I have seen, too, what I suspect is their nest. A great jumble of branches balanced in the top of a black walnut tree that stands a few miles south of Stull.

The wingspan of a mature golden eagle runs about about six to seven feet, and when they’re hunting, they’re fast, with incredibly sharp eyesight. Would-be Satanists beware, the thunderbirds of Stull are watching you.

Brain Tug of War

The human brain is a strange thing. I assume they’re all strange, even though the only one I know intimately is my own. Part of its strangeness is the battle between wanting to write all the time and never wanting to write again. The last two years have been a perpetual tug of war on that front. I got sick, and then as a result of getting sick, I was injured, and because of my injury, I ended up having to move. There was a whole raft of things related to my mother’s estate that I had to deal with. My dog got sick, then died. Even though I wasn’t sure I was ready, I took in another dog who desperately needed a permanent home.

In the middle of all that stress, I started to feel like I would never write again, and part of my brain simply accepted that. That part began imagining a life where I would get a job at the turnpike tollbooth near my house and maybe go back to playing Zelda in my spare time. The other part of my brain insisted it was ready to go back to writing, but it only manifested that by writing random paragraphs about characters and stories I’d never thought about.

The thing about tug of war is that eventually one side has to win, either through trickery or through stamina. In October, I had a vague idea for NaNoWriMo, and I thought having a deadline might help me get back into the rhythm of writing. I made a few notes, so that I wouldn’t forget my idea, but then I got up the next day and started writing. The next day, I wrote some more. This is why I’m generally not interested in books or movies about writers. It’s a bit boring reading about someone writing, isn’t it?

At any rate, between October and February, I wrote a book, which definitively answers which side of my brain won the tug of war. The book went to my agent, and she sent it to my editor, and now we all wait to see if it’s worth a damn. The important thing, at least, is that having finished a book, I think I might finish a few more.

Meanwhile in reading, I’m not remotely close to catching up on my TBR, but I’ve been getting some reading done. Apparently I’m in the L’s.

Good Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Today I was reminded of another winter day almost ten years ago, when I was out walking my dog in the early evening. It was cold and slushy, so I was looking for the clearest route home, which turned out to be the parking lot behind an apartment complex that had been plowed. As we walked through the lot, I saw a cell phone lying on the ground next to an empty parking space. Generally speaking, I believe in good deeds. If I’d lost my phone, I would appreciate someone picking it up and getting it back to me, instead of leaving it to be run over.

I was surprised to find that it didn’t have a passcode, but that made it simpler. I called the number that seemed in heaviest rotation on the phone, figuring that person could help me. A girl answered, and when I explained what had happened, she passed me to her boyfriend, the owner of the phone.Far from being grateful or pleasant, the boyfriend, who hadn’t even noticed his phone was gone, swore at me and accused me of stealing his phone. I asked him why he thought a thief would call him on his phone and repeated that I’d found it in the parking lot.

“What do you want me to do with it?” I said, completely over my good deed at that point. Foolishly, I imagined that he would tell me his apartment number and I would put the phone in his mail box.

“I’m on my way to Kansas City. I’m gonna be at the Applebee’s on Metcalf,” he said.

Okaaaaay. What I really thought was Who the hell drives all the way to Kansas City to eat at Applebee’s? Who drives anywhere to eat at Applebee’s?

“So you need to come over there and turn over my phone or I’ll call the police.”

He really said that! Turn over his phone! I couldn’t help but think of the the saying No good deed goes unpunished. For the first time I thought of why that is, and I had to conclude that unfortunately a lot of people are not prepared for kindness and don’t know how to do gratitude. Why? I’m not sure. My theory about this guy is that he was a terrible person, so he expected everyone else to be terrible too. What a sad way to go through life.

As for me, I opted out of having my good deed punished. I certainly wasn’t driving anywhere to deliver a phone to some jackass. As I stood out in the cold with my dog, there was a temptation to power down the phone and throw it into one of the apartment complex’s trash dumpsters. I’m not inherently an evil person, though. More Chaotic Neutral, really. So I said, “There are three empty lots at the corner of 19th & Tennessee. I’m going to throw your phone in one of them. It probably has enough battery power left that you’ll be able to call and find it, if you get here in the next 2 hours.”

I hung up without waiting to hear what he would say. I didn’t answer when it rang. My dog and I walked on to the corner of 19th and Tennessee, and just as I said I would, I threw the phone as far as I could into one of the empty lots. Then we walked home.

Later, at bedtime, I took the dog on the same route, out of a sick curiosity. At the corner, I could see two people walking around in one of the empty lots, using a cell phone as a flash light. Reader, it was the wrong empty lot.

A long hiatus at its end

Two years ago, I was overwhelmed by a lot of things. Writing, career, family, health, dogs, personal stuff. In order to keep going, I gave myself permission to let things slide. I figured as long as I was keeping myself and the dogs alive–safe, fed, with a roof over our heads–I would let everything else go, including social media and newsletters and my blog. Permission given, whoooo, I let a whole bunch of things slide.

Those two years have been good, though, because they’ve allowed me to reassess what I’m willing to let go and what I want to hold on to. One of the things I really want to let go of is Facebook. As a corporation it’s awful, but also almost all their user interfaces are terrible, too. Among the things I want to hold onto are my blog, because unlike social media, I’ve always felt like my blog really belonged to me. It’s my content, presented in the way I want, with control over who can interact with it. The real question now becomes how do I want to handle having a private place for us to talk books and writing? I don’t know yet. I’m considering doing a members only aspect to this blog, or possible a Patreon. Still thinking through that, but definitely something, because I want to be able to share things I’m reading and working on, without it being open to public consumption (and bot harvesting).

After a year of serious personal upheaval, I’m back to writing, too. I’m working on two novels, hoping to get a first draft of one of them finished by the new year. I can’t figure out which one will reach the finish line first. The only way to answer that is to keep writing. So I suppose I’d better do that, while the dogs are napping.

It’s supposed to be a reading chair, but the dogs don’t read

Small miracle but a big feeling

There are a lot of literary prizes in the world, but not that many awarded on the basis of readers’ votes. This is why one of my favorite second place finishes was when All the Ugly and Wonderful Things came in second in the Goodreads Choice Awards in 2016. Nearly 28,000 people voted for my book, and it beat out such big name authors as Jodi Picoult, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. My mind was boggled that so many readers voted for my book.

This year, sadly, The Reckless Oath We Made didn’t make the first round. Then something amazing happened: readers wrote my book in. Enough readers that it moved on to the semifinals. You still have about 12 hours left to vote in the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards. You could even vote for The Reckless Oath We Made, if you wanted. It would be an even more astounding little miracle if it moved onto the next round.

Even if I don’t make it to the next round, however, I feel like I’ve experienced one of the things that writers don’t talk enough about. We talk about awards, we talk about reviews, we talk about advances, and we talk about the disappointments and frustrations of publishing as an industry. So rarely do we talk about that small piercing feeling of joy in community that comes from connecting with your readers, and hearing from them that they connected with your book.

For writers like me who are extreme introverts with mental health issues that make appreciating ourselves difficult, it’s a huge feeling to know that you’ve stitched this fragile thread between your work and its readers, to know that there are people out there who are nodding along as you tell your stories, and they’re passing those stories onto others.

So while it feels like a little miracle that my book garnered enough write-in votes to end up in the semifinals of one of the few really big reader awards out there, knowing that my people have found me is a big deal. Thank you for the part you’ve played in that.

Not every bad choice is a mistake

It’s possible you ended up here because you read my essay about sex work. Or it’s possible you’re here because you read my new book, The Reckless Oath We Made. (Or my last book, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things.) Whyever you came, you may be thinking about bad life choices and mistakes.

Whether you came here to judge me or to sympathize or to say you’ve been there, what I most want to tell you is that not every bad life choice is a mistake. Sometimes the only choices available to you are bad, worse, and worst. In that scenario, the best choice you can make is a bad one.

Sometimes those bad choices bring good things. They’re not all mistakes. I never felt like the choices I made around performing sex work were mistakes. They brought me here, where I am alive, succeeding at my chosen career, and have people who love me. May all your “mistakes” be so beneficial.

The characters in The Reckless Oath We Made are also in situations where all they can hope for is to make the least bad choice available. Those choices may look like mistakes from the outside, but that doesn’t mean they won’t bring good things. So if you’re here to process your thoughts about your own choices and “mistakes,” welcome. If you’re here to lecture me about my choices, you’ll likely leave disappointed. I’ve had plenty of time to evaluate the choices I’ve made in my life and I’m okay with them.

Where lightning strikes

My new book, The Reckless Oath We Made, is nearly here. In just one week, it will be on sale everywhere, but even now it’s out in the world. People have advance copies to read, and if you’re a Book of the Month member, it’s one of the August selections.

I’m starting to hear from people who’ve read both All the Ugly and Wonderful Things and The Reckless Oath We Made, which is a little scary, because people can’t help but compare the two books. The verdict? They’re very different books.

The funny thing about having an unexpected bestseller like All the Ugly and Wonderful Things is that it creates expectations. Publishing wants me to write another book that is somehow exactly like my bestseller, but different. Readers who’ve only read that one book by me expect that all my books will be like that one.

The problem is that I’ve never been interested in writing the same book over and over. There are authors and genres that specialize in recreating the same sensations and feelings over a series of books. In fact, that’s one of the big selling points for a known author with a particular style: you always know what you’re going to get.

It’s true that I frequently revisit certain themes in my writing–poverty, drugs, mental illness, dysfunctional families–but I like to investigate those themes through different characters, different points of view, even different styles. I suppose I could try to recreate the feeling behind ATUAWT, but I don’t see the appeal. Lightning may strike the same place twice, but why would you want it to?

So if you pick up The Reckless Oath We Made expecting it to be exactly like All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, you might be disappointed. If you come to it looking for a new story with new characters, I think I can show you something interesting and moving. Does The Reckless Oath We Made have poverty, drugs, mental illness, and dysfunctional families? Oh yeah. It also has a lot of other things: knights, a waitress in distress, a prison escape, suitcases full of weed, a castle in the Flint Hills, love, loyalty, a heartbreaking betrayal or two, and even some medieval dirty talk.

You still have time to pre-order it from my local bookstore. If you do, you’ll get a signed hardcover first edition and some bonus book swag.